Tune in today, July 12th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

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1

All my old records are new again.

I’m not sure the younger generations have the same relationship, the same experience with music. First and foremost they’re multitasking, doing other stuff while listening, but also they have so many other ways to interact with artists, whereas we only had the music. Sure, there were some magazines, we were hungry for info, when they reviewed a concert or record in the paper we were thrilled, but the music itself was primary, and we were always trying to get closer to it. 

We started off with mono, there was double inventory, with stereo albums a dollar more, never mind that at that point many people were just buying singles. Then the manufacturers decided to raise the price of mono to that of stereo and mono disappeared nearly instantly. The funny thing was we’d heard that playing a stereo record with a mono needle would ruin it, but once mono disappeared they said just the opposite. Who do you trust?

So we started off with all-in-one record player boxes. And as the sixties progressed we cashiered those for something with detachable speakers, and then maybe even separates, and by the seventies there was an entire stereo industry. Think of it like today’s mattress industry on steroids. That’s right, you can’t avoid advertising for online mattress companies, and you could not avoid advertising for stereo equipment back then. And just like with automobiles previously, we became experts, we were familiar with terms like Total Harmonic Distortion, referenced as THD, and we mixed and matched cartridges with turntables and amplifiers and speakers to get the best sound. And the irony is the stereos of yore produced a better response than almost all of the systems people are employing to listen to music today. Sure, you can get good headphones, but that’s a different listening experience. There’s nothing like turning up the music in a confined space, your bedroom, living room, even your car, and luxuriating in the sound.

It sounded like music. Too much of today’s “music” does not. What people love about vinyl is the analog sound, which most experts will tell you can be achieved with Pro Tools today, but after forty years of digital the idea of the thin, crisp, high-end, inferior digital sound is baked-in. Even worse, those who make the music reinforce this notion. The music is compressed, it’s made to play back in headphones. The bottom is emphasized. The key is to make the music POP, whereas back then the music itself was enough.

Which is all to say for the last day and a half I’ve had the experience of yore.

First and foremost I’ve got my Genelec system, superior to what most people had in the seventies. I’ve been inundated with e-mail from people asking exactly what it is.

Well, it’s a three-way system.

All of the speakers are “Active,” as in self-powered, as in they contain their own amplifiers.

So my two satellites are G Ones: https://www.genelec.com/g-one

The G One is readily available. They cost $350 each. Good luck getting a discount, you can’t.

My subwoofer is the F One: https://www.genelec.com/f-one

The F One is easily purchased, it costs $825.

So if you buy the complete system, you’ll end up spending $1525.

You can see the complete system here: https://www.genelec.com/home-listening/g-one-f-one-stereo-system

Genelec is a professional product, as in designed primarily for studios. But the products in my system are designed for home audio specifically.

Now to make it just a bit more confusing…

There are five models in the G series, the G One through the G Five.

Also, there’s another subwoofer, the F Two.

Now prices jump considerably as you go up the line. The G Five is $1795. Apiece! The F Two subwoofer is $1,495.

However, the G Two is $525.

Bottom line… If you’re looking for computer speakers, anything beyond the G One/F One system is overkill.

And they’ll play quite loud. But if you’re looking to have your three-way system be your primary stereo in a pretty large room, you might want to buy G Twos or…

To get the complete picture go here and scroll down: https://www.genelec.com/home-speakers

As it says atop the page, “our G and F Series speakers and subwoofers finally bring professional audio quality into the home. For music, movies and gaming, nothing matches Genelec’s purity of sound, unique minimalistic design, total reliability and ease of use.”

In other words, are you ready for a professional, studio quality experience in your home? That’s what these Genelec deliver.

And I was blown away with them. Still am. But now with the DragonFly Cobalt the music has been brought to a whole new level, as I said yesterday, it’s ASTOUNDING!

2

So I can’t tear myself away from my computer. I skipped lunch, didn’t ultimately eat until five, when I finally had to take a pee or explode. Do you remember the experience of yore? Being so into the music you can’t tear yourself away, listening is the only thing you want to do? THAT’S IT!

And let’s be clear, I’m listening to music BETTER THAN CD QUALITY!

Now on Amazon Music you can search on “Ultra HD.” Then scroll down to Playlists and you’ll find twenty two of them, broken down by genre.

I started off with Folk, because I felt the improvement in sound quality would be most noticeable there.

I played Joni Mitchell’s “River”…and let me tell you I don’t think you could get closer unless you were with Joni playing in her living room.

And after sampling a few other songs, by John Prine and Neil Young, I went to the Ultra HD Classic Rock playlist.

Tracks that I rarely pull up, like ZZ Top’s “La Grange”… It was like Billy Gibbons was right in front of me, telling me the story of that shack out on the range. There was a bite in the guitar, I’m smiling writing and listening now, because you can only hear that edge live these days.

Stunningly, the burned-in-my-brain “Gimme All Your Lovin'” revealed nuances I’d missed even though I know it by heart. LISTEN TO THE GUITAR!

Then there was “Free Fallin’.”

“And it’s a long day livin’ in Reseda

There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard”

That’s the second best part of the song, other than the chorus, because it’s personalized, that’s what I loved about those Frank Zappa albums, all the references to Southern California locales, like El Monte Legion Stadium. Not so special, but part of everyday life. And the drums…sounded like real drums.

Which is all to say you should hear “Paradise City,” my favorite track from “Appetite For Destruction.” That’s the first thing you notice, that I noticed, the drums, like Steven Adler was banging on cardboard boxes with a lot of echo. And you could hear the separation in the vocals, they didn’t all run together like they normally do. You probably don’t even know there are multiple voices in the verses!

And another song I never have to play, because it’s always on the radio… “Behind Blue Eyes,” I was even closer. Those fingers on the acoustic, whew!

And “Sweet Emotion.” That bass, there was a real person playing it, it wasn’t just a sound!

And “Dreams,” although my favorite track on that Fleetwood Mac album is “Over My Head.” I looked up the album, it was released on July 11, 1975. The band opened for Loggins & Messina and Rod Stewart and the Faces on August 31st, the songs from that album were already well known, they played “Over My Head.”

And then “Kashmir”…

Now if a song is on the Ultra HD playlist, that means the whole album is in Ultra HD. So…

I went back to those early Zeppelin albums.

After playing “Good Times Bad Times” I clicked on “Dazed and Confused,” the song I sing to myself most from the first album. And it sounded so great I let the record continue to play, to the second side opener “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and then…

“Black Mountain Side,” which seems a mere segue on the album, not a throwaway, but not essential. Oh, don’t argue with me, you know what I mean. But today, TODAY! All the instruments were separated, I can see Jimmy Page playing as I listen right now, I SWEAR! My brain got so deep into the song that I truly got it for the first time ever, fifty three years later, I bought that album in ’69.

And “Dancing Days.” Many people think “Houses of the Holy” is the best album, I don’t agree, but I love “Dancing Days.” The magic here is in Robert’s vocals, all the rough edges, all the nuances are suddenly there, the record stops being iconic and reverts to music, it’s new again.

And after playing some of “III,” I went to “II,” an album I couldn’t listen to for years, I’d played it that much, it was EVERYWHERE! And I’m not gonna play “Whole Lotta Love,” I start with “Ramble On.” John Paul Jones’s bass is rounded and fat. As for Jimmy’s guitar, it rehabilitates his rep instantly. Too many people crap on Jimmy today, for ripping off old bluesmen, but in truth everybody has roots, there are only so many notes in the scale. Here Jimmy’s just a guitar player, he’s not a writer, not a producer, he’s just part of the sauce, and you can TASTE HIM!

“What Is and What Should Never Be”… Almost like listening to it the first time.

I mean the DragonFly sharpens the sound and I hear bass that I never do, making me wonder sometimes if the subwoofer is connected.

And I needed to hear “Going to California” and “The Battle of Evermore,” and, of course, after the latter, comes…

“Stairway to Heaven.”

Which I wasn’t going to play. But now the instruments were all separated, it was like the music was being played in a meadow and only me and the band members were there. It sounded so good, I let it play through. And I learned all over again why it’s the #1 FM classic rock track. There’s a magic there, embedded in the sound, it’s all flat and packed together on the radio, but here…it was almost like I’d never heard it before, I couldn’t turn it off. It’s so AMAZING, I wish you were here right now so you could hear it with me, you’d be smiling, looking at me with a magical look of disbelief.

And then the Doobie Brothers. I played all my favorites. And at the end I went back to “Toulouse Street” to hear the title track once again, and while I was there…

I decided to play “Listen to the Music.” The experience was similar to that of listening to “Stairway to Heaven,” a stone cold overplayed classic was stripped down to its essence, or should I say the tracks were cleaned and, once again, it was instantly clear it would be a smash. I mean this is the sound the Doobies heard in the studio, did they know what they had here?

3

Now in truth, I was hooked on Apple Music last night. And it was great, but so many of the albums I wanted to listen to were not in Hi-Res Lossless, just Lossless, and it makes a difference, believe me, I compared the two. (Don’t ask me why so many albums, even the same album are in Ultra HD on Amazon, but not Hi-Res Lossless on Apple Music.)

And I’m thinking of what I love, that resonates, that I lived with and… I decided to play “Face Value.”

You have to know at that point, Phil Collins was almost unknown, the drummer for Genesis who’d become the lead singer, this was before the MTV mania.

And my favorite song on “Face Value” is “You Know What I Mean.”

But halfway through that, I realized I had to play the iconic “In the Air Tonight.”

Now I bought this album when it came out, not long after I’d stopped living with my girlfriend, it was personal, it spoke to me, I could own it.

“In the Air Tonight” was known by no one, no one talked about its drums, no one sampled it. I’m listening again now, I can’t take it off, I can’t let it go, remember when the track had to finish before you could leave the house?

And after “You Know What I Mean” comes “Thunder and “Lightning.” You have the loss and the rebirth, that’s the highlight of the LP for me. And the funny thing is that neither has a Wikipedia page, even though so many of the other tracks do. Am I the only one who feels this way?

Yes, listening to “Face Value” I had to go to the Wikipedia page. Oh, I know so much, nearly everything. But I had to relive it, I had to look for new crumbs. Some of the album was cut at the Village Recorder, not far from my house, to think that all that music was being created there and I didn’t know, if only I’d been there!

But listening to the albums now I feel like I am.

And yes, these are old albums, “classic rock.” But that’s why they call it “classic.” And listening yesterday and today I realized that it won’t be long before classic rock is like the blues, where people study it, are immersed in it. Turns out rock and roll really never will die.

But it was a point in time. A few decades in fact. These acts spent so much time in the studio trying to get it right, knowing we’d break the shrink wrap and drop the needle on our stereos and dive in, we’d have jumped into the speakers if we could, anything to get closer.

Today all of that is a lost art. The music made sounds good on AirPods, lousy systems, why take all that time, spend all that money to make it so honest and real?

Some of these records are fifty years old. They should sound dated, out of time, but if you can reproduce them in full fidelity they sound more modern than what’s in the Spotify Top 50, they sound more HUMAN! I’m not anti-machine, but at some point in music the machines took over from the people. You could not only create sounds, you could fix them, to the point where all the edges were smoothed off, there was no humanity left.

I know you think I’m full of it, that the experience I’m having can’t be this good. BUT IT IS! Like I said above, I can’t tear myself away from my computer, there’s so much more I want to hear.

And you should too.

https://bit.ly/3PkyJWf

This thing is ASTOUNDING!

I mean it’s tinier than a pack of gum, MUCH smaller, yet it packs an AMAZING PUNCH!

You see I wanted a DAC so I could listen to hi-res music on my Mac. I’ve got an external DAC/Amplifier, the ALO International, that’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but it needs power, as in having to plug it in, and when I unplug it from my Mac it goes crazy, as in the screen starts flashing in and out and…

I’d been reading about these DragonFlys for years, but how could something so tiny make that big a difference?

Now I’m not the average guy, I’m not even sure I’m a jealous guy, but John Lennon would have loved the DragonFly Cobalt, anybody with a passion for music would!

So what I’m starting with here is an iMac 5k. And in order to get a DAC that plays a sample rate up to 96kHz you have to have a Mac notebook introduced in 2021 or later, or one of those new Mac Studios that are supposedly on back order. (Meanwhile I was lamenting the inclusion of legacy USB-A ports, Steve Jobs would have excised them, but the DragonFly comes with such, although a cable for the modern standard, USB-C is included.) And needless to say my iMac 5k doesn’t qualify, even the new iMac doesn’t qualify!

So what is a DAC?

It’s a digital to analog converter. Yes, today music is digital. Unless you’re playing vinyl, or maybe cassettes or some other antique format. And in order to hear it, it has to be converted to analog. And your device has a DAC built-in, at least my devices have one, but…

This is what I say about cars. If you’re willing to spend six figures you can get state of the art. Is a hundred thousand dollar car worth twice what a fifty thousand dollar car costs? Absolutely not. But in order to meet a price point, they have to cut corners on the fifty thousand dollar car. And they’re cutting corners on just about all the computer equipment you have, your smartphone too. They’ll turn digital into analog, but at a low resolution, and if you try to play “High Resolution Lossless (ALAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz)” in Apple Music you’ll get the following message:

“To play content in Hi-Res Lossless at full resolution, you will need an external digital-to-analog converter.”

Ergo, the DragonFly.

Not that the AudioQuest DragonFly is the only DAC available. (Also, here I must also say there’s an amplifier included, which can’t be a typical one, the device is so small, but I’ll save investigation for later.) Hell, if you want to drop some bread it’s easy to spend thousands. It reminds me of the stereo mania of the seventies, we didn’t only hang out at record stores. Remember when you searched for the ultimate sound? I do.

Now there are three DragonFlys. They range from the $119.95 Black to the $229.95 Red to the $329.95 Cobalt. I’m listening through the Cobalt.

Now I want to check it out with my iPhone, but it turns out I need a USB 3 Camera Adapter, which I do not have. But I have an iPad Pro with a USB-C port and I’ll try that out with headphones later, but right now I’m MESMERIZED listening to the sound coming out of my Genelecs.

Oh, that’s another thing, most people use awful computer speakers. Maybe they even use the built-in speakers. And if they have externals, they have stuff that’s cheap and sounds like it. I’ll use my car analogy above. Sure, it sounds like the song, but to hear it the way it was meant to be listened to, you’ve got to pony up. Think about the speakers in your car as opposed to what you can purchase in the aftermarket, even though car speakers are better than they used to be, when you went to the BMW dealer and could get a replacement for fifteen bucks.

Now with the subwoofer this three-way Genelec package retails for about $1,500, so I don’t expect your system to be in that range, but having said that… If you buy this Genelec system you won’t need any other stereo, and for $1,500 that’s cheap.

So I was wondering if I’d hear the difference. I figured it would have to be subtle, I’d have to A-B endlessly. But I plugged in the DragonFly Cobalt and…

I went to Amazon Music for hi-res. I decided to listen to Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time,” since I know it so well, and if you pooh-pooh it you’re a punk. And from the very first note…IT SOUNDED LIKE MUSIC!

You could almost see the fingers roaming the keyboard.

And honestly, “Foreplay” is not my favorite part of the song, but when it segues into “Long Time,” that’s PRICELESS! The track slows down, as if someone jammed on the brakes, the instruments rise to a fever pitch and then it gets quiet, it’s like a summer evening, and then, AND THEN…the bass drum pounds and the guitar starts to WAIL! Darting around the sky, doing loops, you can’t take your eyes off it, or in this case ears.

So I was blown away. I’d been planning to spend an hour or two trying to hear the difference, but it was IMMEDIATE! It’s like the music was suddenly in focus and with more punch. It’s like there was nothing left out. This was the sound we yearned to attain back in that seventies heyday with our big rigs.

So then I removed the DragonFly from the chain. The punch was gone, the sound was tinny.

This thing really shouldn’t make that much difference, BUT IT DOES!

Change starts from the bottom up. If you’re waiting for your elected officials to go against the grain, to foment change, you’re going to wait forever for something which never comes to pass.

The most important article you will read today is this:

“One Small Step for Democracy in a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town – A Cautionary tale from Croydon, N.H., where one man tried to foist a change so drastic it jolted a community out of political indifference”: https://nyti.ms/3nSRCUq

I’ve never heard of of the Free State Project, have you?

Probably because I live in the mainstream news bubble. Like most people. I’m not a crackpot trying to undermine America. Therefore I’m out of the loop.

Check it out:

https://www.fsp.org/mission/

Bottom line? These wingnuts have moved to New Hampshire to remake the government in their “libertarian” viewpoint. And this resulted in the firing of the one and only policeman in Croydon and the lowering of the school budget from $1.7 million to $800,000. Yes, the Free State Project infiltrated this one town of 800 and remade it to its liking. And what about the populace? It was PISSED!

This is happening all over America. The worst is people who take over the school board yet home school their kids. They want to change the curriculum which their kids are not exposed to.

This is a stealth operation. Kind of like the Federalist Society, albeit with even a lower profile. These are long term plans, which end up with results like the Dobbs decision, throwing abortion back to the states, effectively eliminating it in so many of them.

We are asleep at the wheel. We figure someone else is doing the hard work, but this is not the case.

So what did they do in Croydon? Under a state law they held a special meeting where a quorum of half the town’s population was required, and took a vote on the school budget. End result? 377 voted against the cut, 2 were in favor of it.

Yes, we can undermine the tyranny of the minority, if we just wake up and participate.

But when you scratch the surface of Ian Underwood, the man responsible for the cuts, you find it gets even worse. He doesn’t want to pay for someone else’s kids’ education. I don’t have any children, but I’ve been paying for public schools my whole working life. And I’m fine with that, I don’t want to live in a land with uneducated nincompoops, it’s bad enough they’re banning books and declaring what you can and cannot teach in classrooms as it is.

Also, no arts, no extracurricular activities, they’re unnecessary. I won’t bother to quote statistics, but I will say one of the reasons popular music is so rotten in America is because of the lack of school arts programs. Isn’t it interesting that Canada and the U.K. and Sweden all punch way above their weight when it comes to popular music. It’s a result of EDUCATION! And a bit of government funding.

So next we have the Kavanaugh dinner at Morton’s. You know, where they were protesting outside.

First and foremost, corporate made a big mistake, it bit back, end result being the restaurant was inundated with false reservations. You see if you align with the minority, you’re at risk of the wrath of the majority.

Targeted protests like this have a result, as opposed to the mass gatherings that resemble music festivals. You’ve got to go where the people live, you’ve got to make it personal. Actions have consequences.

Needless to say the right wing was up in arms. And what was the left wing response? TO DOUBLE DOWN!

That’s the problem with Democrats, they cower in fear. Meanwhile, tons of lefties came out and laughed, tweeted away, names you would recognize. As for Fox News? Of course they thought it was heinous, but the goal here isn’t to convince the minority watching that execrable channel, but to awaken those who are asleep, and motivate them!

This is paying back the right and treating it with some of its own medicine.

And some of the analyses are priceless.

“There Is No Constitutional Right to Eat Dinner – Claims that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had his rights violated by protesters outside a D.C. restaurant fail on originalist grounds.”: https://bit.ly/3atm30k

The Dobbs decision was illogical, originalist thinking is irrational. This article illustrates it. Too bad so many people have had such poor educations, too often blind in parochial schools, to understand this.

Never underestimate the power of the individual:

“Post-Roe, Her Facebook Group Went Viral – Veronica Risinger made a little online spot for neighbors to share information on abortion. Then 30,000 people joined.”: https://nyti.ms/3OYLrdq

This is the future of change, not showing up with a sign at some government building hoping for a smidgen of coverage in the local news that almost no one sees. This is how the Republicans do it, why can’t the Democrats? 

As for Congress solving our problems:

“Putting the Public Back in Public Service – A group of academics and lawmakers, citing a new study that found voters feel shut out of congressional deliberations, is pushing to engage citizens more directly in the work of Congress.”: https://nyti.ms/3yv6oFJ

Here are a couple of relevant passages:

“‘There is strong evidence that they actually don’t even know the views of their constituents,’ said Steven Kull, a psychologist who heads the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. ‘They might know the squeaky wheel who shows up at a town hall meeting, but they don’t really know.'”

And:

“In a new study based on a survey of more than 4,300 registered voters last year, Mr. Kull’s group found that the public’s low opinion of Congress stems at least in part from the impression that lawmakers ‘have little interest in the views of their constituents, have a poor understanding of the public’s views and do what the majority of Americans would do less than half the time.”

So if you’re depending on your elected officials in D.C. to be aligned with your viewpoints, you’re dreaming.

So the situation was articulated perfectly today by Ezra Klein:

“The danger Democrats face in November is hopelessness and apathy among their base. Why turn out to vote if nothing will pass anyway, and if the Supreme Court will gut whatever slips through the Republican blockade?”

This describes my hopelessness exactly. I’ll still vote, but the only way I can survive emotionally is by disconnecting from the fracas in D.C.

You see the majority wants abortion rights. The majority wants stricter gun control. But elected officials beholden to vocal minorities are thwarting this. While we remain silent.

But reading the stories above I am given hope.

You see unlike the gun rights/mass shootings stories, abortion is personal, it affects essentially everybody. And when I read about the Kavanaugh/Morton’s situation, and the left wing pushback to the right wing blowback, I am given hope. This issue just won’t die, it has legs, when seemingly nothing else does in America today.

What price will Elon Musk pay for pulling out of the Twitter deal? I’m not talking about financially, for which he should pay handsomely, I’m talking about image-wise. You’d think marching through business and the legal system as if the rules don’t apply to you would cause a long-lasting hit to his image. But that probably won’t be the case. Especially in a country where Donald Trump repeatedly broke the law and it looks like not only will he emerge unscathed, he’s got a good chance of being president once again.

I wish this wasn’t so, I wish there was a moral code. But not enough people have one. The same Free Staters who feel they shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s education.

But it’s worse than this. All the anti-tax agitators, they lament the government spending THEIR money. Okay, stop paying, and the roads will have potholes and the bridges will collapse and it will be chaos 24/7 and if you die in the process, don’t go looking to the government to make you whole.

Even worse are the rich, who want to control how the money is spent. Now let me see, you made your money in a single vertical… Do we really want you running the country? History is littered with the rich and celebrities who gained office on their names and then failed in their duties. You see it’s more complicated than that. You wouldn’t want a home-schooled doctor to operate on you and you don’t want an amateur running the government. But that does not mean you don’t want a hand in selecting who is in power.

I can’t believe the Dobbs decision. It does not compute. Abortion is gone? Oh, don’t tell me you can get it here and there, the fact that you can’t get it elsewhere is unfathomable. Why does the minority rule over the majority? You want to take away my rights but whenever we tell you to do something for the good of society, like getting a damn vaccine, you cry FREEDOM, and the sanctity of the human body. Shouldn’t that work both ways?

It doesn’t, just like with the inane Supreme Court Dobbs decision. Where stories from the past were cherry-picked to create a decision that was a foregone conclusion in the minds of the justices. They didn’t weigh the law and the facts, they just figured out how to create a legal narrative that fit their conclusion.

I am not preaching to the other side. They already know all this. The Democrats were ahead online, but they’ve been superseded by the Republicans, it happened years ago. Good luck getting change re misinformation. The goal is not to complain, but compete! Go online yourself, make some noise, create a group.

Just one more thing…

Yesterday in the “Wall Street Journal” behavioral economist Dan Ariely fielded a question from a conservative who was weary of airing his views at parties after soccer games. He felt being neutral was to his benefit.

Ariely’s response was priceless:

“Studies have shown that when you don’t take sides, people tend to assume you hold the opposite views of the group. Research also shows that people tend not to like or trust people who remain neutral on controversial topics—particularly when withholding an opinion appears to be strategic, such as when a conservative politician deliberately avoids taking sides on an issue in front of a liberal audience.”

https://on.wsj.com/3AEDl5e

You think it behooves you to be silent, to avoid disruption, to have your life run smoothly when exactly the opposite is true!

You’ve got to play. That’s the only way out of this mess. It’s personal. I know so many are defeated, I certainly am. But when I keep reading stories of personal triumphs, especially online, I gain hope.

We can do this.